THE SUFFRAGETTES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 944, 13 September 1957, Page 17

THE SUFFRAGETTES

VOTES FOR WOMEN, by Roger Fulford; Faber and Faber, English price 25/-. HE. ramifications of the suffrage movement make it a_ singularly difficult subject for the historian, but Mr Fulford has succeeded in writing a sober and at the same time entertaining book which is quite masterly in the selection of material. The real factors behind the whole struggle were never very clear. Sometimes it seems that Votes for Women is the main theme, sometimes it is the sex war blazing up as it never has before or since, and sometimes the emphasis shifts to equality of the sexes and the general emancipation of women. Party politics play Yj

a far greater part than is generally recognised. The newly fledged Liberal Government of 1906 was in favour of women’s suffrage, but because this meant extending the franchise to people who, because of property qualifications would all vote Conservative, they rejected all such proposals in favour of a bill introducing universal suffrage (and so came in for the brunt of militant suffragette activities). It is difficult, too, to be sure where it all began. Mr Fulford takes us back to 1733 when the right of women to vote was first examined by lawyers-who, incidentally, found that there was no law against it. The greater part of the book deals with the period 1900 to 1918, and the split in the women’s movement, and particularly with the militant faction (the Women’s Social and Political Union) which was under the brilliant leadership of Mrs Pankhurst and her indomitable daughter Sylvia. The author somehow manages to. keep a nice balance between the heroic and the comic side of the story. The lighter relief is supplied mainly by the men who opposed the "Cause." As F. E. Smith remarked at the time, "One of the peculiarities of this controversy is that it disorders the faculties of even the ablest men." For us today the most tragic thing about the whole unhappy episode of militancy, with its violence, brutality and ribaldry on one side and its courage, sentimentality and idealism on the other, is the mistaken idea behind it. Suffragettes and their male and female supporters really believed that once women were represented in Parliament a new and glorious epoch would automatically follbw, that women had something of inestimable value to contribute to society, and that it was only the lack of a voice in government that stopped them from abolishing war, and almost all wickedness. This is a book that is too good to miss. The story that raised such tempestuous fury and such staggering fatuity in the decade before the 1914-18 war can now be seen in perspective, and Mr Fulford has done it full justice with lucidity and objectivity -above all, with a light touch. But he is a serious writer and the funny bits seem to find their way into the pages almost against his will. Aware of this, he expresses the hope that the heroic courage of all those women who bravely suffered ridicule in the Victorian era and imprisonment in the years that followed, will in these pages never be far from the reader’s mind,

Margaret

Garland